Book Project: Northern Exposure

Quirky Quality TV: Revisiting Northern Exposure

Soon to be published as the first Critical Studies in Television monograph by Manchester University Press.

Edited by David Lavery and Jimmie Cain, Middle Tennessee State University, John Zubizarreta, Columbia College

Call for Papers | Tentative Table of Contents | Contributors

Northern Exposure Episode Guides:

The editors of an in-development collection of essays on the television series Northern Exposure (1990-1995) seek your proposals.

In Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER, Robert J. Thompson offers the following capsule account of the CBS Dramedy Northern Exposure.

"In July 1990, CBS offered up something for all those viewers who were spending the summer wondering who killed Laura Palmer. Though Northern Exposure was set in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska, it was filmed in Roslyn, Washington, just down the road a piece from Snoqualmie, the town that stood in for Twin Peaks. The similarities between the two shows didn't stop with the scenery either. Northern Exposure had its own rural quirkiness, surreal story lines, and ensemble of off-centered characters. It wasn't just an imitation, however. Northern Exposure had already been conceived and developed before Twin Peaks premiered. The striking similarities between these two independently created series suggests that quality TV was following a distinct evolutionary path. The artistic mandate for innovation that had engendered Twin Peaks had apparently been yielding similar results elsewhere as well. Still, the writers of Northern Exposure began reacting to Twin Peaks early in their first season. Exposure's fifth episode even featured a scene shot at Snoqualmie, in which the characters gaze at the waterfall as Peaksesque music plays in the background and mentions are made of coffee and cherry pie."

We want to reassess NE’s contribution to the development of quality television. Northern Exposure will be aimed at an educated but not highly-specialized audience. The essays chosen for the volume will be scholarly but not obscure, knowledgeable but not erudite. A publisher will be sought among both mainstream and university presses.

The following list of topics is meant only to be suggestive and not exclusionary.

ASAP, but by no later than the end of January, please send either your completed essay or a 500-750 word account of the essay you would like to contribute as an e-mail attachment (in Word or as a Rich Text File) to jcain@mtsu.edu. Be sure to include with your proposal a brief bio of yourself. If your essay is chosen for final consideration, you will have until the end of May to complete it.

Quirky Quality Television: Revisiting Northern Exposure

Northern Exposure’s “Artless Art”: “Animals ‘R Us” and Television Beauty

For the Love of Film: Cinephilia in Cicely and the Cross-Media Intertextuality of Northern Exposure

Cicely Under the Skin: Female Narrative and America’s Historical Unconscious in Northern Exposure

Rhonda V. Wilcox (Gordon College)

“In Your Dreams, Fleischman”: Dr. Flesh and the Dream of the Spirit in Northern Exposure

Meg Albrinck is Assistant Professor of English and chair of General Studies at Lakeland College.

Jimmie Cain is Associate Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches courses in composition, war and literature, European literature, and Victorian literature. His book on Bram Stoker (Bram Stoker and Russophobia) is forthcoming from McFarland.

Felicia Chan is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nottingham, investigating the translatability and readability of films across cultures. She has authored chapters and articles on a range of subjects from Singapore poetry to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Draagon.

Máire Messenger Davies is Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Centre for Media Research, in the School of Media and Performing Arts at the University of Ulster. A former journalist, with a BA in English from Trinity College Dublin and a PhD in Psychology from the University of East London, she has worked in universities on both sides of the Atlantic before joining the University of Ulster in 2004. Her research interests are primarily in young audiences and in popular television drama. Her most recent book is ‘Dear BBC’: Children, television-storytelling and the public sphere’, published by Cambridge University Press, 2001 and her next book, with Dr. Roberta Pearson of Cardiff University, will be a study of American television, using Star Trek as a case study—Small Screen, Big Universe: Star Trek as Television—for the University of California Press.

David Scott Diffrient is a doctoral candidate in Film, Media, and Digital Studies at UCLA.

Jane Feuer is professor of English and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include The Hollywood Musical (2nd ed. 1993) and Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism (1995). She is currently writing a book on teen films and genre theory.

David Lavery is the author of over eighty published essays and reviews and author/editor/co-editor of nine books: Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age (Southern Illinois U P, 1992), Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (Wayne State U P, 1994), ‘Deny All Knowledge’: Reading The X-Files (Syracuse U P, 1996), Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), Teleparody: Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of Tomorrow (Wallflower, Columbia U P, 2002), This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos (Wallflower, Columbia U P, 2002), Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television's Greatest Sitcom (forthcoming from Continuum, 2006), Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By and Reading The Sopranos: Hit TV from HBO (both forthcoming in the Reading Contemporary Television Series, IB Tauris, 2006). He is also co-editor of in-development books on Twin Peaks, My So Called Life, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lost, and Fake News.

Janet McCabe is research associate at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Managing Editor of Critical Studies in Television. The author of numerous articles on film and television, she is the author/co-editor of Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (I.B. Tauris 2005); Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema. Shortcut Series (Wallflower Press, 2004); Reading Sex and the City: critical approaches (I.B. Tauris, 2004), and in-development book on Desperate Housewives.

Daniel Panici is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Media Studies Program at the University of Southern Maine. He was one of 18 faculty selected nationwide for an International Radio and Television Society conference to share ideas about prime-time entertainment.

Rhonda V. Wilcox is Professor of English at Gordon College in Barnesville, GA. The author of numerous essays on popular culture, she wrote the chapter on television for The Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture, is the co-editor of Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), and the author of Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I. B. Tauris, 2005). A member the editorial board of Studies in Popular Culture and Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media, and Refractory, she is the co-editor of Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies

Dr. John Zubizarreta is Professor of English, Director of Honors and Faculty Development, and former Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Columbia College. A Carnegie Foundation/C.A.S.E. Professor for South Carolina, he has also earned honors for teaching and scholarly excellence from the American Association for Higher Education, the South Atlantic Association of Departments of English, the National Methodist Board of Higher Education, the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education, the Southeastern Conference on Christianity and Literature, and Columbia College.

Quirky Quality Television: Revisiting Northern Exposure

Rhonda V. Wilcox (Gordon College)